Thursday 3 April 2014 15.57 EDT
First published on Thursday 3 April 2014 15.57 EDT

Members of parliament have been feeling sorry for themselves for some time now. They tend to moan mainly in private, but many of them still feel scorched by the exposure of the greed and avarice of some erstwhile colleagues. They resent the widespread impression that they are in it for what they can get when many feel they have given up a lot in the honest belief that, far from taking out, they are paying in, helping to make the world a better place.

That makes the events surrounding allegations that the culture secretary Maria Miller misclaimed on expenses between becoming an MP in 2005 and the scandal breaking in 2009 particularly tawdry. It is understandable that there was a Twitterstorm of rage following the news that her penalty was merely to repay £5,800 of wrongly claimed interest and apologise to the House of Commons. The appetite for humbling politicians is large and growing, fuelled by anger that so many ordinary people have been left in desperate need by cuts and benefit sanctions. Mrs Miller did little to help by taking precisely 34 seconds to go through the motions of apologising for an offence which, in the outside world, would have surely cost her her job.

The original complaint against Mrs Miller came from the Labour MP John Mann after a newspaper revealed that her parents shared the London house that she had designated as a second home. While there was a prima facie case for Mrs Miller to answer, there was also a sense of partisan tit for tat, retribution after a colleague of Mr Mann's, the former minister Tony McNulty, had to repay £13,000 for claiming for a second home that his parents lived in. He subsequently lost his seat.

It has taken more than a year for the parliamentary standards commissioner to complete a complex inquiry, and weeks more for MPs on the standards committee to adjudicate. This was a tangled tale about what interest could properly be claimed and, more significantly, the appropriateness of designating as a second home the house Mrs Miller and her husband bought long before she became an MP and shared almost from the start with her extended family. Second homes, according to regulations, have to be wholly and exclusively for parliamentary purposes.

The standards commissioner, Kathryn Hudson, looked long and hard at the evidence she could extract about decisions authorised as much as nine years ago. In her final, highly critical, report the commissioner acknowledged she had interpreted the rules very strictly. The findings on the substance of the charge will make uncomfortable reading for the minister, but they did exonerate her from the initial allegation that her parents gained from the taxpayer by the arrangement. All the same, Mrs Miller faced serious criticism for the erroneous interest claim, for failing to keep proper records, for a lack of transparency, and for failing to cooperate.

The MPs might have softened the tone of the commissioner's report, but they upheld its main findings. They found that Mrs Miller was wrong to designate her London house as her second home, and that she must repay the wrongly claimed interest. But MPs accepted her word that her decision had been authorised. There was the apology to the house for her failure to cooperate with the inquiry and repeatedly challenging its remit. And that is it. It is not only the twitterati who will feel she has been treated generously.

This is an uncomfortable place for any minister to find themselves in, let alone a senior minister in a high-profile role dealing with sensitive media policy. Even if Mrs Miller felt it was a politically motivated charge, the role of the commissioner must be treated with respect. However inwardly seething, she should have been conspicuously open. The extreme brevity of her apology added to the impression that she felt traduced rather than, unintentionally or not, guilty of a serious breach of the rules. The result is not just damaging to Mrs Miller. MPs look as if they still don't get it.